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With tears caressing her sunken cheeks, one mother reluctantly hands me her toddler. I choke on a raw breath as I curl my arms around the child. When the mother coughs, splattering blood onto the pallid ground like a crimson constellation, I lurch. Concerned, I knit my brows, my stomach sinking. I swallow the dread clogging my throat, eyes fixed on her, on her blood. Tenth Court farms don’t allow sick humans to live. They drain their blood, recycle it, and cleanse it while burning the remains to prevent the spread of any infection.
The Goddess’ new prophecy burns my blood and heart with the reminder of aScourge.
I can’t think. I can’t stay here.
Instead, I suck in a deep breath, balancing the power in my heart. Just as Neo taught me, I harness my power, picturing a beauteous, soul-hammered, and tensioned scythe—even if my emotions are more like passionate whips of pure star fire.
I weigh my overflowing emotions—justice, righteous wrath, and most of all…empathy. My time here has given me the ability to release Empath Elysia from her cage more often. These raw emotions might torture me and strain my heart, but I need them more than ever.
The Court O’ Tens is my gilded cage, but these children will find their freedom. I will return to Neo’s Tower, knowing they are safe.
I don’t stop until I’ve drained the Halo to its last dredges. It dims in a warning. Finally, each beautiful soul arrives at Jesula’s Underground route.
Well done, sweet girl,Nita commends me through our mental link—the oneshecreated. At our meals with Quillion, I’m forever asking questions, wondering how her fathomless abilities work.
Sooooo sweet,echoes Kitty with a soprano chirp.
I bite my lower lip, cheeks reddening from the awkwardness and my dark curiosity about Nita’s DID systems. So far, I’ve only met Kitty, Amanita’s hyper-sexualized alter, and a glimpse of Bryony, her tragic trauma alter. No, I can’t deny how attractive Amanita is, how Kitty would love nothing more than to get her hands on me and every other body part. But that’s a line we will never cross out of respect for my relationship with herbrother. So, Kitty must be satisfied with just a kiss on the cheek. Okay, and I’ll occasionally let her smack my ass or grind against me. Love and sexuality might be her only form of expression, her best and only gifts, but she still respects my boundaries. Our boundaries.
After the final child, I catch my breath and lean against an iron tree. The blood moon has begun its ascent: the only indicative of nightfall in the Father’s Court O’ Tens. That blood moon ignites my very cell matter with the memory of mine and Neo’s wedding. And how he watched me with those pupils dilated, how I went off-script with my vows, how I truly captured my Prince that night.
Burning pins and needles pierce my flesh, my blood, my heart. I jolt, almost crumbling from the pain. A gasp escapes my throat. The pain. Our blood oath.
Holy fucking shit! Neo is back.
* * *
The achein my blood grows but can’t compare to the throbbing pain in my chest when the fang maids prepare me. Not even smuggling all ten children comforts me from thismortification.
Months ago, I could refuse to wear something. This time, I cannot refuse because of not one buttwooaths that he’s cashing in tonight. I bristle. Those vows taunt my mind, reminding me I’m at his mercy.
We believed our bond was stronger than his mind. Perhaps it could be if his heart was just gone—if it was frozen…notreplaced. How can I hope to reclaim his memory when I must wrestle with this foreign heart Lux holds?
He’s mocking me with this “outfit”. According to the Prince’s command, the fang-maids have taken a sample of my blood and used it as paint to scrawl the Tenth Court flames and roses all across my naked flesh. They scrawl gold petals around my areolae and rouge my nipples, leaving them exposed—like the flushed buds to the fire-blossom petals.
Gold teardrops roll down my cheeks while the fang maids finish with the designs on my back. They sweep my blood down my spine and around my backside. They tickle my navel with their brushes, twirling them down until they disappear in my fine gold curls just above my sex. Transparent swathes of crimson fabric attach to a thin gold belt trussed around my pelvis. They do nothing to cover my intimate regions.
By the time they’re finished, I’m struggling for breath. My lungs constrict, throat tightening with the need to find Neo, to crash into his arms and offer me a reprieve—the only way to satisfy the blood oath. But an unbridled fury storms my system.
So, I test my boundaries. After they’ve buffed my skin with a needless glitter-glow and formed my curls into a crown on my head, I shrug into a white cotton robe and knot the sashes multiple times before I rush up the stairs and plunge through the shadow door.
He doesn’t catch me.
I suck in a deep gust of air, searching for him.
He doesn’t remember carrying me in the honeymoon hold to our bedroom. He doesn’t remember my whispering praise of our “lovely, dark, and deep” bedroom. Somehow, the Triumvirate laws resolve the timing, but he still knows our blood oaths. He also knows I am a Princess, the daughter of Reyna Rose.
Everything else is a poison in his mind and a scourge in his substitute heart.
For a few moments, I stare out the window—my hand bathed in scarlet beams of the blood moon canting through the glass. I sense him, smell him one moment before his icy shadows and heated flames stroke me. Tickling my naked legs, curling around their lengths—just as they did on our wedding night. I startle from his essence closing in on me, his dark and masculine dragon energy, his scent of dark water and vetiver essence. Spine-tingling breaths of lust drift their heavy heat onto the side of my neck as his hands descend to the robe at my shoulders.
It takes everything in me not to flinch, but he undoubtedly senses my rattled nerves.
“This is not what I ordered you to wear,” he snarls against my neck.
I shouldn’t be surprised when I turn and find him stark naked like the first time, his vamp shaft bounteous, thick, and full—hard as his black diamond armor. Even if he hates me, his body knows me, wants me.
On our “honeymoon” night, I cursed and tried to escape him. If I tried to do it now, Neo would sniff out the lie from a mile away. I won’t win his heart by pretending.
